Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Coding Site GitHub

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Beastie7

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What could this mean for the source tree repo? Should the devs jump ship? Will the redmond company screw us all? Oh my!

Film at 11.
 
I hope that the general disapproval of Microsoft in the Open Source community will lead to more projects considering their options. It is a very bad sign that one large commercial company (GitHub does not exist just for the fun of it) which is anti-FLOSS, anti-meritocratic and anti-white has the power over so many free software projects. The notable advantage of Git, according to Git advocates, is that it is "decentral". There is no obvious reason to rely on one central Git hoster because of that.

I'll happily support any project which decides to stop supporting GitHub - for whichever reason that may be.

jm2c
 
New GitHub logo.

aPjQe8Q_700b.jpg
 
Well, I'm not worried to be honest. I think way too many people allow themselves to be led by assumptions and of course prejudice against Microsoft. Please note: I'm definitely not claiming that Microsoft is that fully innocent and misunderstood IT company, heck no.

But I also don't think they deserve some of the backlash they're getting either. And I've seen this happening way too many times before. For example: I'm a vivid Minecraft player. And no, I'm not a teen (born 1970, aged 48) but I really enjoy the game nonetheless. It takes getting used to, sure, but once you do....

Alas, I'll spare you guys a rant. My point though is that Microsoft has also bought Minecraft (as you might know) and sure enough: this would spell the end for Minecraft because $Microsoft. Now... they have made some controversial changes and decisions. For example: 'Minecraft' as a name has always been a Java game. However, right now the name "Minecraft" fully refers to the previously known "Pocket Edition" ("PE") and the original is now known as "Minecraft - Java edition". Definitely some controversy there. But it also makes sense: their's more money to be made there (also through micro transactions) and there are more players on PE than on Java.

But the Java edition is still going strong today. Despite popular rants and negative rumors that it was all going to be Windows 10 ("PE") and Java would soon be dropped we're now several years away and right now the Minecraft community is anxiously looking forward to the release of "Project Aquatica", version 1.13. Said to hit the Java edition within a few weeks. Dropping Java, how?

Also... Microsoft has been here before. Codeplex. I was a member and I actually enjoyed that website. Didn't do much with it but, even so, it wasn't all too bad.

So yeah, my projects will stay put and I think it's the best thing to do: not react in panic, lets first see where this is taking us. I honestly think this could turn out into a good thing. IF you're willing to give MS a fair chance. "Best tool for the job" and all.
 
Shouldn't it be the other way around? "github agrees to be acquired by Microsoft" I've seen a few sources remove themselves from github and it's kinda sad because the code is essentially gone unless you are like me and save it locally.
 
I still consider GitLab a little bit odd considering their reputation with backups ;) Maybe that's a bit of an unfair sneer on my part, could be & fair enough, but I still can't wrap my head around the scenario where a company can maintain 6 backup schemes and all of them fail (mostly because no one checked to see if they actually did anything).

Even so... these are interesting times :)
 
This is ridiculous. Yes, as a paying customer of GitHub, using it for my closed-source products, I'd be (a bit) worried. But definitely not as an opensource dev in my spare time. After all, this is git, a distributed SCM, where every "working copy" is a whole repository. There's nothing anyone could ever do that would force me to continue using GitHub -- I can push my repos to another service (gitlab, bitbucket) or to my own server any time. So, just relax ...
 
Smaller projects enjoy the benefit of agility and will probably migrate in droves, while larger ones will wait and see. As for the new owner and its intentions, it is a matter of time and therefore mostly irrelevant. What matters is that one more independent project gets assimilated with little (if any) benefit for the end-user.
 
getopt a business will report taxable income when they absolutely find no way to hide it.
 
getopt said:
7.5 Billion USD. Imagine the amount of taxes they avoided before to afford such a deal.

Isn't that a little too much for a business that produced losses?

But wait ... now you have an evaluation of the worth of data and metadata of the people that used GitHub in the past. The service provided obviously was not for free ...
Click to expand...

This is the part that I don't understand. How is github possibly worth this much? I can't see the metadata on users being anywhere near this valuable. The 1st thought to cross my mind, can call me a conspiracy nut or what not, is that someone section of Microsoft is going to be combing the repos for ideas to then pass off as their own...
 
roddierod said:
This is the part that I don't understand. How is github possibly worth this much? I can't see the metadata on users being anywhere near this valuable. The 1st thought to cross my mind, can call me a conspiracy nut or what not, is that someone section of Microsoft is going to be combing the repos for ideas to then pass off as their own...
Click to expand...
Probably not. Some Github content is important for Microsoft because .NET Core development happens on that platform. There are also a lot of related projects. This alone isn't a reason to buy the platform, but maybe Microsoft just wants to make sure Github survives, because of this -- of course they profit a lot from an active opensource scene around .NET Core.

As for the "value" .. this is something I can't understand either, but it looks like the basic idea is the following (often seen in the past even with online services that never made even a tiny bit of profit): If a platform has a large and active user base, the thought seems to be there HAS to be a way to generate large profits, even if nobody knows how :eek: (which reminds me a bit of South Park).
 
What can be the reason is this, and you may want to think of this when facebook buys a new startup for a ridiculous price, or google does or...: these companies are only worth that much as long as people believe they are.

When you need to extract some money from such a construct without loosing a lot of share value you need to, kind of, not give away that money. You buy some small shop or startup which was started by someone you want to give that money to. So he gets what is due, maybe, and you get something in return to write into the books to keep the balance. If it does not work out, pity pity cry cry but you did an investment into the future of your company. It is not like you liquidated half of a fortune 500 just to settle a drunken bet, isn't it? If it does work, so much the better.

The question would now be what does Microsoft want these 7.5E9$ to do out there?
 
That article spends a lot of time asking, "If not Microsoft purchasing github, then who?", when the important question that needs asking is, "Why?". Why should any other company purchase it in the first place? The article, and many others, ask the same question of Microsoft. Why did they buy it?
 
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